I had been using Mint 11 happily for several months so, as it was to become unsupported from October, I installed Mint 13. And, frankly it's been nothing but trouble: errors, hangs, crashes, not booting. On the occasions it does get going it's pretty good, but the problems seem to be intermittent. Can work fine yesterday evening, but not start this morning. PC hardware recently checked by local shop (in business many years)and stated to be working correctly.

Some problems (but not all) seem to be around Mate desktop eg: trying to add Firefox to Desktop from menu leads to hang/crash. Could be drivers. Chrome also seems to be 'fragile'. I've had, /. not found on start up, /tmp not ready or present, kernal panic and so forth.

Fed up trying to sort it out. In fact this post has been sent from PC now running XP - brilliant. As a consumer I have things to do rather than spend my time fiddling with the OS.

Something is wrong, makes me wonder if Maya is the mint with a hole or maybe a humbug. All the problems I have appear on this and other forums but not altogether on one PC - like I seem to be experiencing.

Thinking of trying KDE version.

I really liked v11 but v13 turns me off big time.

RichardS31.10.2012

Last edited by RicahrdS on Mon Nov 05, 2012 6:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

Just a little update to my saga. Thought I would have another try and this morning everything was working fine. That is until I tried to copy and paste files to DropBox when, after the usual varied shenanigans, I eventually ended up (how?) with a list of I/O errors citing bad sectors on the new hard drive. OK so must be a dodgy HDD. I'll get that checked.

Left it until I arrived home about 30 mins ago. Thought I would just try again - mug that I am. Turned on, Grub presented etc. Screen stating hard drive being checked. That ended and PC rebooted, noticed that Grub screen did not have the default log in countdown. Anyway, selected Mint and log-in screen presented and seems to be ok.

Launched Chrome, so far so good, then some sites cannot be loaded, then Chrome closes when I hit the back arrow.Try to relaunch Chrome - 'Mint menu has quit unexpectedly' reload? Ok. Not a good idea! This problem seems to be one that surfaced 4/5 years ago and I cannot find any record of it being reported on Mint 13.Have to turn off at machine.

Restart PC and it now hangs at the Bios splash screen....again.Can't even get to into the bios to boot up the HDD with XP on it!

Being a good Brit one bites the stiff upper lip and carries on. I thought I'd give it another go.As it was MintMenu that had crashed I decided to delete the package and reinstall. That went ok. There was a second associated package for MM, that did not go ok. Hot - turn off.Tried to log in, usual bits about /. being missing, etc, Pressed F and so forth. Eventually booted.

Then 149 updates suddenly became available (no I had not missed these before), so these were installed, and fingers crossed things seem to be pretty stable so far. In fact I have even added an app to the desk top without the OS freezing. I am quietly optimistic.

I would probably recommend running apt-get or aptitude to upgrade everything. I've found that mintupdate doesn't always work completely. Just look at what it's installing and upgrading before you go through with it. I've never had a problem with doing it this way since Ubuntu 6.06, and that had some other complications anyway.

And if you can't get into BIOS, then I think you have bigger problems than a bad hard disk or a corrupted mint install. I had a problem similar to yours. 2 weeks later the motherboard started smoking. replaced that and the computer has been running fine for over a year now.

You have quite an annoying and severe hardware bug it seems.At least once I had some intermittent or not I/O errors, but could fix it, it was coming from a simple IDE ribbon cable. Major hardware problem, but fixed for free

Another time I fixed the cable too and did all my best but ended up junking the motherboard, some bus on the motherboard was corrupting the data, my job was to take the decision of getting rid of that PC that was working but not quite (at least the case, PSU and HDD in there were nice and could be kept)This computer would have passed all tests (memory with memtest, temperatures fine, voltages fine, boots fine..) but still doesn't cut it.

An IDE (or SATA) controller can be corrupt, too. So you can use the PC without it (even if only from live CD, network, USB..), use another controller if you can, or.. there"s something deep, in the bus between processor and chipset, or the PCI bus, that ruins something every billionth time and leads to a PC doing the same as yours.

I have at the back of my mind that there is a hardware problem probably the MB or even power supply. Engineer tells me it cannot be a cable - but I take such things with a pinch of salt. My view is if it can go wrong at some point it will. The PC was exactly 6 years old yesterday and although used at home does get used quite a bit.

I'll try the apt-get suggestion first. But I need to get to a point where I can launch a terminal.

This morning incidentally, booted up fine. But then seemed to take an age to do things eventually 'hung' nothing would load. So I rest the PC and waited, Grub came up, selected Mint, message presented about loading kernal first. Represented with Grub, so I selected Mint recovery mode which proved terminal and in due course what should happen but Win XP is booted instead. And it is from there that I am posting this.

XP seems to work fine which suggest to me that power, MB and original HDD 6 years old) are all ok and that problem either lies in SATA connection, cable or HDD carrying Mint. Or is software based.I think I'll delete Google Chrome browser too as this seems to have been 'live' when the problems have arisen. Other though is that the Mint installation is placing greater load than XP on the MB/PS but this seems unlikely to me. (You'll understand that I am not a techie!)

Well pleased to say that the apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade seem to have worked swell. And the environment is stable at last, no hangs or anything else for 24/48 hours.Great suggestion from bigj231 thank you.

So next I decided to address the lack of sound in apps such as Banshee and VLC. Whereas I had sound in YouTube for example and Gnome Movie Player, there was nothing in the audio apps at all. This is a widely reported problem and I tried a) changing the settings to analogue - no benefit and b) killing pulse audio on start-up again with no benefit, and then c) after installing pulseaudio from the package manager. Hey Presto, once I'd adjusted the settings in the PulseAudio UI, I have sound. Getting happier by the hour! (if anybody tries the various solutions available don't forget to remove the killapp process from the startup - if that does not solve the problem for you.

So this morning is bright and cheery, until I try to launch LibreOffice. Think I'll get some breakfast and let PC reboot and see if that makes it better!